Saturday, June 05, 2010

Renowned Nuclear Physicist, Dagwood Splits The Atom, Part 1

If anyone can do it, it's Dagwood.Culled from the archives of Professor Mike Fontanelli, curator of the Alexandrian Library of Cartoon art.I wish Dagwood had been teaching when I was at school. Maybe I would have paid attention.More exciting adventures in education to come...

10 comments:

Wow! Comic strip characters can be educational and fun at the same time after all.

No normal kid would want to read out of a boring textbook with cold, lifeless diagrams and drawings, no matter what "level" of class they're in or how smart they are. Imagine if my chemistry teacher from this year had given my whole class something like this to read and learn from, instead of all those worksheets and reading guides. Maybe there wouldn't have been so many failing grades. It's all common sense.

Comics were just absolutely COOL back in the day! They'd cram cool stuff in there every chance they got! You know why they'd have those little text stories in comics? Because if they had a certain amount of pure text in a comic book, then they got a lower rate on postage and shipping! It's true!

Years ago I struck up a friendship with one of the old pulp writers--Ryerson Johnson--and he told me all about it. He wrote dozens of these little one and two-page shorts for the Binder brothers (E. and O. Binder, well known for their serial ADAM LINK, ROBOT) who took on contracts for Dell Comics and DC Comics and needed help to fulfill their legal obligations. They'd contracted to write more of the damned things than they could manage, so they farmed them out to guys like Ryerson. The "Dagwood Splits the Atom" was likely something to keep the text at a high enough level to get the lower rates and qualify as a certain type of publication.

Old comics were ten billion times better than the shit that's on the stands today.

It's fun to see a educational and fun comic at the time. Rare are those like this who can perform this kind of educational absurdity.

This is maybe why i mostly dislike modern comics these days no matter the genre. They are all pretentious and made by people who never meet others peoples than the ones from others comic-books. And that's count Manga too.

No joke, I was actually on vacation but the whole time I watched Ren & Stimpy and Invader Zim, and I actually had a dream that I got in CONTACT with you, lol.(Btw, your dream self almost never answered me and laughed all the time XD Either tell your dream self to get more social, or make sure he stops acting like Eddie *Kidding*)